DIY Rope Ladder for Agility Training

Many athletes know the benefits of agility training with a rope ladder. Soccer and football players use them often for quick feet drills to improve speed and performance on the field. For such a simple piece of equipment it is surprising how expensive rope ladders can be. Here we will show you how to build rope ladders for agility training to your own specifications and for much cheaper than store bought ladders.

The first thing you will need to do is head out to your local home improvement store to pick up your supplies. Agility ladders are incredibly cheap and easy to make at home because of their simplicity. All you will need is some rope and some pipe for the rungs. Here we will go through the specifications for a 10' ladder but you can change anything you want to make the ladder to your needs.

For a 10' ladder you will need:
40' of rope to the thickness of your liking
11' 1/2-1" diameter pvc pipe

Once you have your supplies you need to cut your rope and pipe as such:
2 - 10' pieces of rope
11 - 1 ½' pieces of rope
11 - 1' sections of pipe

Next you need to measure every 1' down each 10' piece of rope and make a mark with a permanent marker. Once you have your marks you simply start at one end and work toward the other, tying the 1' section of rope to one mark, threading the pipe onto the section and then tying the other end to the mark on the other 10' piece of rope.

One final tip is to pick up a piece of Velcro used to tie cables together. Attach the Velcro tie to one of the end rungs so you can easily wrap up and store your ladder. You can adjust the boxes by making shorter rungs and placing the rungs closer together or making larger rungs to make bigger boxes for larger athletes or different drills. Soccer players tend to enjoy the benefits of small boxes to work on quick, short steps while football players tend to use ladders with larger boxes for bigger steps. One could also create an acceleration ladder by making the boxes longer from one end to the other and making a longer ladder. Altogether this project should cost less than $20 and take less than 1 hour to do.